I agree with your thoughts concerning Armstrong Stadium. In retrospect It was a great decision. I love the looks of the arboretum in the middle of campus. Besides 10th St. stadium was in poor condition prior to demolition.
SEZ update, August 2018
- Thread starter RBB89
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I agree with your thoughts concerning Armstrong Stadium. In retrospect It was a great decision. I love the looks of the arboretum in the middle of campus. Besides 10th St. stadium was in poor condition prior to demolition.
I'm for it..., as long as they all have continuous loop ribbon boards inside and out (just to feed my ADD
)...What....?!? All these architectural critiques and no one cares about our dying Sunset Maples on the Alumni side of the stadium?!?
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Likely the drought from several years ago is what caused the damage to those trees. I make maple syrup, and have noticed dying sugar maples all over Bloomington after those back to back droughts. They're shallow rooted, so they're susceptible to drought, especially if they're not adequately mulched.
Hopefully that's the case, I actually thought I started noticing their distress further back (maybe four to five years ago) but if they had been poisoned I didn't want to make a big issue of it on a fan site message board and give the perpetrators any positive reinforcement...
At any rate, due to drought or otherwise, several of them appear to have large portions of dead former growth right in the middle of them... Maybe a potential spot for some limestone commemorative obelisks???
It's too bad... I liked those trees...
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10th Street Stadium was torn down in 1983; following my freshman year. By that time IU was winning national championships in soccer. I know new construction can be cheaper than renovating, but it would be a much better venue for soccer & Little 5 than Armstrong Stadium.
what are you, 5 yrs old?
to answer your question, i'm more like 110.
the thing about being old is, you've been around long enough to know those things that looked like a bad idea at the time, or really bad idea, inevitably virtually always turned out to be a really bad idea after all, so you learn to trust your instincts, don't buy into the latest fad, and don't buy into any BS regardless of the title or rank of the one pushing it.
10th St. stadium was literally falling apart, and it was hardly Wrigley Field to begin with. This is asinine. Go look at the fencing/old ticket booth at the arboretum if you miss it so much. Armstrong Stadium is scheduled for a $6 million renovation anyway, when a lead gift is found.
Not buying it. The moneyed interests are lying about the real reason they tore it down and built the “arboretum” instead of making the few minor alterations that would have made it as good as the Polo Grounds.
If the capitalist fat cats in NYC hadn’t torn it down, we could’ve purchased the Polo Grounds, put it in storage, and then replaced the old stadium with a better version.
Stick a pool in center field (plenty of room) if you really need a so called “arboretum” or “landscaping.”
Plus the water polo team could play there.
And spare me the complaints about “cost."
This could have easily been done. I have no actual idea what I’m talking about, but this certainly is a lot of words so I have to be right.
Why does there have to be a lead donor? How about using btn money solely on athletics instead of academic buildings? Seriously, I’m thankful for your insight, but I wonder why university funds just can’t be used. Thanks rbb89!
A Freakonomics Radio podcast on the World Cup presenting economists' data about home-field advantage / referee bias is worth a listen. Presents data to support what most of us already assume.
One economist's quote:
"'In soccer, the home-field advantage is cut in half when the game is played in a stadium where the field is surrounded by a running track — that is, where the crowd is farther from the referees.' Moskowitz [professor of finance at the Yale School of Management and co-author of Scorecasting] is pretty convinced the referee-bias theory can explain a lot of the home-field advantage effect."
Lots of other good stuff in this episode.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/world-cup/
I guess we can quibble about minor aesthetics but I think we can all agree that the stadium looks better that it has ever has. The new training and support facilities are great. The now fully enclosed MS will be louder and give us a greater advantage and a better experience for players and fans alike. As great as all of this is, I view it as half done. The completion of MS needs to be married with an effort to fill the place up for every game with screaming Hoosier fans. Yes, winning will aid that effort but let's not wait for the fan base to build itself. Some things I would like to see are as follows. Have someone who's only job is to get butts in seats if that isn't the case already. Stop making people buy tickets they don't want and won't use and are only being sold and usually to opposing fans. I would think that a lot of the die hard fans that we do have were once kids who's parents took them to games and maybe who"s grandparents took their parents. Why not run contests at schools around the state for free tickets. You get the kids there and the parents and maybe they come back. At the very least they make noise and buy concessions and keepsakes. If we want to compete with the big dogs on the field and on the recruiting trail MS needs to be rocking every home Saturday in the fall.
I’m assuming because even though we are in the black, it’s still a small profit. We are trying to do a lot of things at once. You need a certain amount in hand to move forward, so I guess they just haven’t been able to get a big donation yet. Fortunately, it shouldn’t take long to do once they raise the money.
As for BTN money, I have no problem with the AD being good stewards toward the rest of the university.
Because athletics is completely self supporting. There’s no way using general funds for athletic facilities would fly through administrators, the BOT, students, taxpayers or the legislature. All public schools are severely underfunded as it is. Asking tuition and tax payers to foot the bill for nicer locker rooms for soccer players is a non-starter, if not illegal.
i'm shocked, shocked i tell you, that you were the only one jogging around that cinder track in August with school out. bwg.
i would have thought it would be packed elbow to elbow with joggers.
not like every other jogger wasn't jogging the far more joggable main campus, out of the hot sun and off that cinder track.
as for the condition of the stadium, had they wanted to fix it up, they could have.
they didn't want to.
still a huge mistake imo. would have been a fabulous soccer venue, many times nicer than Armstrong, (Armstrong isn't even in the same league with what it would have been), and given a far higher cool factor to that part of campus.
no going back now, but this idea that the decision making brain trust always gets it right on huge decisions that affect the facilities and campus for decades and longer, just isn't the case.
having the power to make decisions, doesn't make one a good decision maker.
The crowd mural is great. They could have left it as clear glass and that would have looked into the interior of the facility and appeared completely asinine. You don’t want to look into the interior of a complex on the inside of a stadium. Nobody does that.
So you're saying we shouldn't really listen to you?
Beautiful Stadium. So much different from when I was there in the early 2000s
Old enough to know that the changes to the stadium are going to be outstanding for the fans and the team. Nothing being done to it is a fad. At your age you probably think hip hop is a fad.
I don't see a fountain in front of the auditorium - wonder when that was put in?
Oh, I disagree with that. I graduated in 1979 and I can tell you that IU Soccer was playing on a national level. It was definitely on the rise and everyone recognized it.
Go back and read some old IDS and HT articles of that time.
It may not be a fad, but it lost it's relevance when white guys got involved. l
I agree with you about a soccer stadium in place of the old 10th street stadium. But that structure was not able to be renovated. They had issues when pouring the original concrete in the 1920s! The last few years, you couldn't go under certain parts of the stadium because it was literally crumbling.
But I think the 'arboretum' is a bad joke. It's not much of an arboretum, if that's what it's supposed to be. It's like a big empty spot in the middle of campus that is begging for some major construction or event-structure to be there. It's not like IU is an ag school that wants to show off all its plants.
Yeah, I'm old. And cranky, too. Is that a bad thing?
Only to the young-ens...
I often get the impression that many of them (on here) would prefer we die off as rapidly as possible...
I've always found this version of age discrimination humorous since:
A) the youngsters can only hope they make it to where we are...;
and B) if they do make it to where we are they'll be the very demographic they seem to love to hate...
Just so I’m clear here, this is “a joke?”
Jesus, this board...
Go look at most campuses and look up “quad.”
Jesus, this board...
Go look at most campuses and look up “quad.”
It's not what it could be. Didn't they just move the clarion there this year? Or late last year? Like I said - the space is begging for some kind of structure.Just so I’m clear here, this is “a joke?”
Jesus, this board...
Go look at most campuses and look up “quad.”
Nice waterfall, but I prefer walking along a natural stream, the Jordan River south of the auditorium and winding its way to the Union. Now that's a 'quad'.
So far, the 'arboretum' is just an empty space they add on to every now and then. I don't know anyone who thinks it's anything special. Unless it's you and your fellow paid boosters.
And if it's a 'quad', call it a 'quad'.
I love the Arboretum. It's a great place to walk through and sit when it's warmer out. No, I am not a paid booster (I wish).
The Arboretum isn't much of an arboretum but it is a nice green space in the middle of campus.
If you want natural, it's not the Jordan River. That's my favorite part of campus as well but very little of the Jordan is in it's original course. It's almost all been rerouted, roofed over, or shored up with stone.
What IS kind of funny is I thought you were yanking our chain with that picture of the tower in the arboretum.......I didn't realize that design had been approved.....that's going to be 162' tall, compared to 91' for the Metz Carillon. For purposes of comparison, Purdue's Tower is 160' and BSU's Shafer Tower is 150'......so it will be noticed......I hope it's a good look.
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